Spring Break

Wow, what a trip! We spent a week on Lombok island in Indonesia. Lombok is about a 2.5 hour flight from us and just south of Bali in the Indian Ocean. I chose Lombok because it was a little lower key and looked really interesting. This was the first time we ventured out with 5 kids and I learned two things: first, it is A LOT of work--we had to scale things way back from my original ambitious agenda; and second, people stare at a family with so many kids, especially with one as young as Juliet (3 months--and at times I thought I was crazy too bringing her to Indonesia.) Despite some minor frustrations, limitations, and exhaustion, the trip was an overall success.

These are some pictures we took just before leaving for home.

The sunsets were gorgeous. Here is the view of the sun setting behind Bali off in the distance. You can see the looming volcano. Indonesia is a volatile land with volcanoes and earthquakes. Lombok has an even bigger volcano than Bali on it which erupted most recently in 1994. People hike to the summit and it takes 3 days. However, it is currently closed because it is spewing noxious gases and smoke.

We stayed at a nice resort on Seneggigi beach. Upon arriving at the hotel, we upgraded to a bungalow that was perfectly situated with a nice stretch of lawn in front and a secluded beach just for us. It ended up to be where I spent a good deal of time with napping youngsters so I was grateful for the close proximity to the beach and the nice view from the couch. We spent two days of the 5 day trip just playing on the beach and enjoying the pool. They even had a horse ride for the kids. Joseph found these local ladies on the beach to braid the girls hair and polish their nails right on our doorstep. The pool was great and warm as was the ocean--probably about 85+ degrees which is perfect in my opinion. Take sand and water mixed with amazing shells, interesting coral, and a couple of boogie boards and you have all the right ingredients for a perfect day.

Just down the beach a ways from our room, the kids found a rock cave. We had to climb over and around quite a few rocks and the kids were convinced that it was a secret cave they discovered. The sand all around that area was so cool--it was like mustard seeds and your feet would sink down into it up to the ankles. And sprinkled all along the sand and into the cave were absolutely perfect, huge shells--the kind you buy in shops. We had such fun collecting them to take home. In fact, we took home some of the mustard seed sand, a huge bag of shells and water bottles full of the Indian Ocean. Then when we got home, we made what I call "Lombok in a bottle" with an old fashioned cork bottle layered with the sand, shells, and ocean water. It was our cheapest and most prized souvenir.
Picture from inside our cave looking out.
Maggie is pictured below walking slowly back from the cave and gathering shells along the way.

We had the opportunity one day to go and visit a local school. We had a special delivery to make: a suitcase full of school supplies. For Christmas last year, my parents gave us a check with an important responsibility attached to it. We had to use the money in such a way that others would benefit from it. With all the deficiencies in this region, the only hard part was deciding who and where to help. We decided on a school in a small village in Indonesia. The kids thoughtfully picked out school supplies with careful consideration of their budget and what the school might need. It was a very rewarding and humbling experience to donate our things and then meet some of the students. It made the country and its people that much more real to step aside from being a tourist for the morning to participate in something more humanitarian. And the idea of making the world a little better where ever we find ourselves, however small it may be, is something we hope to continue.

There are a variety of ways people in Lombok transport themselves and their stuff: motorbikes with caged roosters tied to the side, cars, people on foot balancing baskets, dishes of rice, or pots on their head, or carts full of all kinds of things and pulled by a horse. Just driving around from point A to point B was a fascinating study of these various modes of transporting people and things, all happening at the same time on the same roads. We tried most of them, well, all except the on foot balancing way. Joseph rented a motorbike and took the kids on rides shopping in Seneggigi and onto the back roads to smaller villages. We rented a car and driver and drove through rice fields, cocoa plantations, and crowded city streets. And we also experienced the horse and cart ride to a small village famous for its pottery. They make the pottery out of clay from the riverbeds and form it into pots on a stationary wheel. Then it is baked in the earth to get a natural dark red color. The kids all got to take a turn making something on a wheel with some clay. I stayed inside the shaded area with all the pots. The picture below doesn't show the red color well. For some reason it all looks kind of yellow (white balance problem I think. )

The rice harvesting was concluding and the locals were drying the rice. We drove by fields of rice in the process of being harvested, a hot and tiresome job. After each rice kernel is extracted from the stalk, it is set out in the sun to dry. The roads were lined with rice drying in the sun. After the rice is harvested, they set fire to the piles of old rice stalks. It was fascinating to see this process going on throughout the island. The picture of the man harvesting and burning in the fields was taken through the car window so, again the color is too grey.

We spent one morning hiking down (a very easy hike as I was carrying Juliet on a front pack) to a waterfall. It was beautiful and cool, refreshing water coming down from the main volcano on the island. The kids enjoyed splashing around and playing in the rocks. Maggie and Xander worked diligently on a rock wall, a "dam" they called it. Abigail made an adorable fairy house, currently one of her favorite past times; and after playing in the water, Ella kept busy with some prized oreos. (We had to use various, innovative techniques to keep Ella happy and out of trouble.) Juliet stayed mostly on my belly in a front pack, but I did tire of that after several hours so I made her a bed, albeit uncomfortable, on a dry rock bed and under an umbrella to shade her from the mist and sun.

Another afternoon while I stayed with the napping little girls, Joseph took the older 3 to the Gili Islands. These are 3 small islands off the coast of Lombok with pristine white sandy beaches and good snorkeling. They visited all 3 of them but stayed the longest at the middle island and snorkeled off the shore. Joseph said it was the best snorkeling the kids have done to date. They saw all kinds of coral and tropical fish.

Home Sweet Home

I've been working on this blog for awhile now; partly because I rarely can sit at the computer without someone pushing or pulling on me, or standing by waiting for a turn, and partly because it took awhile to sort though thousands of pictures to find the ones I needed. I wanted to post a history of the homes we have lived in to date. We have had the opportunity to move a lot and live in some interesting places and homes over the last 12 years, collecting experiences and adding children along the way. Someday, I think the children might appreciate seeing the home they came to upon their arrival. And I also feel that this is a tribute to my roll as a homemaker: setting up homes and making memories in them.

Home #1: Wyview in Provo, Utah. I don't even remember the exact address it was so long ago-- May of 1998 when we combined our meager belongings and moved in. I pulled this photo off the Internet as we didn't take any pictures of our home (nor did we have a digital camera anyway.) We lived here a brief year in one of the top, 2-bedroom units. It was our first residence as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Gordhamer-- "newlyweds" (I always felt uncomfortable with that label.) Two months after we moved in, I graduated from BYU and worked in Provo while Joseph finished up his undergraduate education. We had fun times rollerblading along the river, attending the Provo temple, shopping at Food for Less, and filling up our Honda for $0.89 a gallon. That first year together in Provo was quite simple compared to life now and seems like a very distant memory.

Home #2: 12705 Fair Crest Court #303, Fairfax, Virginia (the top unit on the lefthand building.) This was indeed an exciting adventure for us to pack all our belongings into the smallest U-Haul truck and drive across the country to settle on the east coast. I was just barely pregnant with Abigail when Joseph took his first "real" job at KPMG in Washington, DC shortly after graduating from BYU in 1999. To date, this is the longest home we lived in at 3 years. We brought Abigail and Maggie home from the hospital on two different snowy, winter days to our cozy condo with the little gas fireplace on. I enjoyed setting up our home, painting, sewing for the nursery, and shopping for little things to add to the walls and corners. We also enjoyed our ward, the Fair Oaks Ward. And I can't forget the roses Joseph brought me regularly from the man outside his office who called to him, "Two dollars a bunch, 3 for five."

We loved living on the east coast. We often would take walks through the wooded area just beyond our home, especially enjoying autumn when all the leaves turned into striking reds and yellows. We loved going into DC and spending time on the national mall there. I used to take Abigail when she was a baby to all the Smithsonians, riding the metro into DC and meeting Joseph after work. We loved the cherry blossoms around the Title Basin and the tulips on Capitol Hill. We even enjoyed several 4th of July celebrations with fireworks exploding over the Lincoln memorial. Joseph had his longest commute here: a walk to the bus, the bus to the metro, the metro to downtown, a walk to the office, totaling 1 hour. That was the hardest part about living here. We also enjoyed many trips up to Philadelphia, into the Shenandoah to camp, Gettysburg, New York, Valley Forge and so on. The area was rich with history and heritage.

Home #3: 2259 Stone Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan. This too seemed like a brief stay from 2002-2004 (maybe because we were there only part of the year too.) We moved to Michigan for Joseph to attend the University of Michigan MBA program. We lived in university married housing, a kind of cabin-like environment complete with pine trees. We added no children while living here, but I have good memories of raising the girls and spending time with other young mothers supporting their husbands in various graduate programs. We enjoyed mornings on the banks of the Huron River with donuts to eat and feed the ducks (and tipping the canoe once with the whole family being dumped into the cold river.) We picked raspberries in the late summer and make freezer jam. My brother and his wife lived in Columbus, Ohio at the time and we always looked forward to their visits--it was the only time I had my family remotely close by. This was my first experience in a bitterly cold place and I guess it was good because it prepared me for more Midwest living.

Home #4: 19 Weynesbaan, Rijmenam, Belgium from 2004-2005. I called this my petite chateau. Not only was the structure quite amazing, but the home was fully furnished by the owner who was an interior decorator. This is only a picture of the back because, unfortunately, we don't have any other pictures. The front was beautiful, all brick, with tall windows and a rock path lined with hydrangeas up to the front door. The grounds were immaculate with hedges, herbs, more hydrangeas in the back, a little moat (mostly for water drainage,) a bridge, a troll's house (aka the shed,) apple trees and more hedges. A wooden fence covered with foliage surrounded the entire property.

After graduation, Joseph took a job with his current company, Cargill, and started out with a brief one year field assignment in Mechelen just outside Brussels. A year is quite quick and it almost felt like an extended vacation. We chose this house because it was beautiful and close to his office (he adopted cycling here and ended up biking to work most days,) however in retrospect, it might have been better to live closer to Brussels and the expat community. I was pregnant 9 of the 12 months we lived here and often felt lonely and isolated. Some days I thought of my home as Chateau d'If--the prison castle in The Count of Monte Cristo. We did have some wonderful times here though. I enjoyed walking up the main street to the village school to get Abigail or pick up my fresh bread from the bakery. We also spent many hours walking around the countryside full of wild berries, pastures with horses, and even a small, fragrant leek farm down the road. Joseph often helped the missionaries teach Romanian investigators and we were able to work with them and have them in our home.

We also had the opportunity to travel a bit in Europe. I kept busy planning our next trip whether it be Rome, Greece, Germany, The Netherlands, or France. It was even fun on the weekends to hop in the car and drive to Luxembourg for the day to see some castle ruins. Alexander was born in neighboring Bonheiden (and we chose his middle name Alexander because it was one of the most popular names in Europe.) Joseph's passion for chocolate was born here as well when we discovered Cote d'Or dark chocolate truffle bars.

Home #5: 3949 Games Drive, Minnestrista, Minnesota. Our very first home and yard of our own! And boy did we learn just how much money and time goes into a house. Joseph about broke his back laying all those concrete blocks, rolling out the sod, or planting pine trees. And I did my fair share painting (and even re-painting) all the walls, sewing curtains, or planting shrubs and flowers. With so much sweat equity, it isn't any surprise that I rejoiced over every tulip bulb that actually bloomed in the spring and mourned the hydrangea that didn't quite make it with the early fall frost. It almost killed me when we had to walk away from all of it--the sweat and the money (the housing market meltdown)--after only 2 years. In the summer of 2007 we packed up and moved on.

This first house has a lot of first memories tied to it. It is the first home that Abigail and Maggie really remember. They have fond memories of the park behind our house and catching frogs and toads in summer. It is the first garage we had that the kids could park their bikes in and where Joseph made a small work bench and built storage shelves. We walked our eldest daughter to the bus stop for her first day of elementary school and waved as she rode away on a big yellow school bus. It was the first traditional neighborhood we lived in and we made really good friends with people at church and in the neighborhood. And I can't forget the first time I had to shovel a driveway covered in snow or found myself behind a lawnmower when Joseph was traveling. We strung up our first Christmas lights on a house, across the roof line and around the pillars by the front door. Then weeks later, I hosted the big family Christmas party with Joseph's family, all of whom lived within an hours drive. We had a lot of good times in this house and it was probably the closest we've had to a "normal," settled life. The kids loved the unfinished basement with the climbing wall Joseph put up, swings, and monkey bars. It really was an endless project though.

Home #6: 15E Bright Hill Drive, Singapore. And so a big adventure began. I had never even set foot in Asia before and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane with the 3 kids and pregnant, moving there. After staying in temporary housing for 6 weeks (much like a hotel,) it was a welcome thing to finally see our belongings coming off a truck and into a home. A big, old musty home, but a home nonetheless. Trying to find a place to live in a big, foreign city and working with a limited company and personal budget is not an easy task. Often we didn't even know north from south as we drove around with the most obnoxious real estate agent possible. We finally settled on this place because it was really the only landed property, which was part of a condominium cluster, that had enough rooms for us that we could afford and that our agent showed us. (I was determined that I would not take an elevator to get to my front door and so that eliminated most of the places available.) So we set up camp here with a 2 year lease. Maggie began Kindergarten and she and Abigail rode the little shuttle bus that picked them up at the driveway to take them up to the Singapore American School. I spent a lot of time with Xander at the nearby Bishan park and going to church play groups. Within a few months, we added Ella Marie to the family and brought her to our home here.

We experienced much of our first impressions of Singapore here and really felt settled after the 2 years. We knew the lay of the land, where all the other expats lived, and how to get around in our Toyota Picnic. We often went walking on Sundays in the nearby reservoirs and on the forest path in the reserve across the street. It is here that we encountered our first monkeys and even had the unpleasant experience of having them on our roof, trying to get into the kitchen. We also became very accustomed to geckos and learned to live peacefully with them in the house. Just across the busy street outside was a local shopping mall and we would often walk there on Saturdays and get Subway for lunch (or Joseph liked to take the bigger kids to the Long House--the hawker center just down the road with local fare.) We had the opportunity to explore some interesting places in Asia while traveling in Cambodia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia. However after 2 years, and pregnant again, it became apparent that we needed even more rooms and maybe a newer house if we were lucky.

Home #7: 7 Melrose Drive, Singapore. And we were lucky. I can't imagine a more ideal place to live and daily I feel so grateful that we found this house. Cargill sacked the old real estate agency (partly due to our complaints) and we had a much better agent this time around. We also knew a little more of where we were and that certainly helped. I feel really comfortable and content with where I am in life both literally and figuratively. I can't help but love the warm and lush tropical environment in Singapore; and with 5 pregnancies and all these moves behind me, I feel like I can stay here for a long time. I think we are at the point where we can see the buds on the trees that we hope will eventually mature into the proverbial fruits of our labors--fruit I look forward to harvesting down the road, probably in yet another home.

With the addition of Juliet to this home, we now have 5 beautiful, healthy children. Abigail and Maggie are almost done with another successful year at school and we have been so pleased with their growth and progress. Xander will soon begin school and is eager to join them. They are all three growing in the gospel as well. Joseph has a challenging and rewarding career that he enjoys, providing opportunity for growth and progress. We also have had many opportunities to serve in the church and grow spiritually. Obviously this hasn't all happened in the brief 6 months in this home, but is part of a process that has taken place in all the homes along the way. It all goes to show that while where you live might be interesting, it is how you live that counts.

Some Notes

I wanted to make note of two cute things that happened this week.

1. Whenever I need someone to watch the baby, hold her or play with her, I can always depend on Maggie. She is more interested in babies than my others, and she has a natural, gentle nature that makes her comfortable and good with them. ("Ge" for Maggie, was Ella's first word.) The other day, I was trying to bathe kids and I laid Juliet on the bed. She was in a good mood and I felt bad just abandoning her like that, so I asked Maggie if she would go keep her company, which she readily agreed to do. When I finished what I was doing, I came in to check on Juliet and Maggie said, "Watch this mom." She then proceeded to stick her tongue out slowly, going in and out like a lizard. Juliet watched her intently. Then, to my complete surprise, she copied Maggie and stuck her tongue out, then in and out again. I was amazed and said to Maggie, "do that again," which she did, and the same scene was repeated. So Maggie taught Juliet at only 2 months old her first trick, a communication of sorts, with her tongue. It was all really quite cute.

2. In preparation for Kindergarton this fall, I recently started teaching Xander to read, spending 30 minutes in the afternoon with him and working on sight words before reading very basic books. He has been making good progress and it is gratifying to watch his pure joy and amazement as he reads the simple words on each page. The other day he was really excited while reading and exclaimed, "I'm so smart mom," which is exactly how I want him to feel about himself as he embarks on his scholastic journey at SAS. It is quite a demanding program and a 8 hour school day (when you factor in the bus ride.) Right now, however, he is attending a more local preschool with Singaporean teachers and children, apparently with a little different vocabulary. Yesterday after a few pages of reading, he stopped and asked why some of the same words started with uppercase letters while others were lowercase. I pointed to a period and explained that after a period the sentence ended and a new one begins with uppercase. He looked really puzzled for a minute then laughed and said to me, "you said period mom. That is so silly. Don't you know that is called a full stop?"

Juliet's Blessing

The same weekend Maggie was baptized, we had the opportunity for the grandparents to participate/witness in Juliet's blessing. She was given a name and blessing by her father for the records of the church. She is still Anna Juliet Gordhamer and a joy to her family. She looked beautiful in her dress on Sunday. (She has been a lot less fussy lately, and I must add these past two nights has slept 10+ hours! My kids all start pretty average weight at birth, but they gain it really fast when they are born and shoot up to the 90th+ percentile in weight. This certainly has its advantages )

Joseph with a lot of weddings to pay for.

Maggie's Baptism

Maggie was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on February 20th. She looked very beautiful in her white dress. She was calm but excited for this day to come. We were so lucky to have both Grandma and Grandpa Larsen and Grandma and Grandpa Gordhamer here to celebrate this special occasion. It was a crazy Saturday morning with Xander's final soccer game and then the baptism. In the morning, I happened to be in charge of the treats for the soccer game and trophy "ceremony." Then at the baptism, I was playing the piano, speaking, and providing all the refreshments too. So I had a lot on my plate, however I was pretty organized and had most of it done days in advance. As it turns out, despite all my careful planning, I did forget one somewhat important thing for the baptism: towels. I greeted a dripping wet Maggie in the bathroom with nothing to dry her off with. Maggie and I had a good laugh about it as she stood under the hand dryer and I patted her with paper hand towels. Joseph was pretty wet as well and took awhile to join us back in the chapel as you can only

imagine how many hand towels it took for him to dry off. Overall it was a really nice afternoon.